ARM to demo GPU-compute at MWC

LONDON – Processor IP licensor ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England) is set to demonstrate a GPU-compute application at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Feb. 25 to 28.

ARM said it intends to show face detection software written under OpenCL full-profile running on a Mali graphics processor. Such software could be used to detect that someone is front of camera in a teleconferencing application. If a face is not present such an application could crafted to go into a standby mode to save power. The software was written by ARM software engineers.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a development framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous hardware consisting of CPUs and GPUs.

ARM executives said there would no other GPU-compute demonstrations on its booth but it would have a variety of demos showing of the range of applications Mali has found its way into. These will include a Sony Nexperia mobile phone, a Google Chromebook personal computer and an Arndale development board for the Samsung Exynos 5 dual-core processor.

ARM said it plans to demonstrate the OpenGL ES3.0 capabilities of Mali GPUs running on the Arndale development board.

ARM licensees of Mali GPUs include Samsung Electronics and ST-Ericsson as well as wins achieved in the far-east with fabless chip companies including AllWinner, Leadcore, MediaTek, Rockchip and Spreadtrum. Samsung and ST-Ericsson also license GPUs from Imagination Technoloogies Group plc (Kings Langley, England).

I wonder where this will lead to, perhaps ARM is looking to expand into the GPU market space? I like the expansion of the ARM family into the GPU space and expect that it is aimed at capturing graphics based ARM applications. What kind of performance does the Mali GPU have?